Saturday, February 27, 2016

OLED65E6P vs OLED65B6P

Since the picture quality is mostly similar on the flat screen OLED65E6P and OLED65B6P, and the curved OLED65C6P, it's their design and sound quality that sets them apart. The premium Picture-On-Glass design is used only by the OLED65E6P.

On the other hand, the OLED65B6P (and OLED65C6P), omit the translucent glass back used by the OLED65E6P for holding the ultra-thin OLED panel. That said, the integrated sound bar makes the OLED65E6P slightly thicker in the lowermost part in comparison to the OLED65B6P and OLED65C6P when measured without the stand. The difference, however, is 0.3 inches so it's almost negligible. The OLED65E6P and OLED65C6P can be wall mounted using VESA 400x200 compatible wall-mount bracket while the OLED65B6P requires VESA 300x200 compatible wall mount.

As previously mentioned, the picture quality is almost identical. Some of the image quality characteristics such as Infinite Contrast and perfect black level the OLED65B6P and OLED65E6P have in common are inherent to the OLED display technology, and more precisely: to the ability to control the lighting of each pixel individually (LG refer to it as "Pixel Dimming"). The perfect black level also provides the OLED65B6P and OLED65E6P with the ability to show saturated colors at low luminosity levels. This means that OLED TVs can render vivid colors with HDR content not only in mid-tones, but also in shadows. When it comes to the brightest specular highlights, however, the OLED65B6P and OLED65E6P exhibit less than ideal saturation. The reason being is that their peak brightness in small specular highlights is only up to 800 nits whereas HDR10 content is typically mastered to either 1,000 nits or even 4,000 nits.

Nonetheless, the ability to cover almost entirely the DCI-P3, which is the color space 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray discs are normally graded in (within a BT.2020 container), means that the OLED65E6P and OLED65B6P require only a minimum amount of gamut-mapping when it comes to reproducing colors in shadows and mid-tones. Specular highlights that are above 1,000 nits are an exception, so there is a more significant amount of gamut-mapping involved. Although this increases the chance of the OLED65E6P and OLED65B6P deviating from the content creators' intentions, it needs to be said that only approximately 25% of the digital code words in HDR10 signal are allocated to specular highlights above 1,000 nits, while the rest 75% are dedicated to shadows and mid-tones. In fact, approximately half of all digital code words in HDR10 correspond to the 0-100 nits range. Since the PQ (Perceptual Quantizer), which is the EOTF (Electro-optical transfer function) that HDR10 and Dolby Vision use, is an absolute luminance function, the OLED65E6P and OLED65B6P map digital code words to the same luminance values, and given the LG OLED TVs similar peak brightness capability, the picture quality with HDR content is identical. Depending on how prominent scenes with highlights are in the HDR content you're watching, you may or may not notice the limited detail the OLED65E6P and OELD65B6P are able to resolve in highlights, but as has already been discussed, the impact of this issue is limited to only 25% of the digital code words in HDR10 signal, and does not affect mid-tones and shadows.

In addition to HDR10, the OLED65B6P and OLED65E6P support another format of HDR called Dolby Vision. Thanks to the scene by scene optimization the dynamic metadata provides, Dolby Vision has a significant advantage over HDR10, which is only optimized for scenes with highlights due to the fact that static metadata doesn't change for different scenes. In order to fully utilize the dynamic metadata of Dolby Vision, the OLED65B6P and OLED65E6P have their peak brightness and gamut coverage information pre-loaded on the Dolby's mapping engine, which is thus able to optimally quantize the dynamic range of the 4,000 nits mastered content to the more limited dynamic range of the OLED65B6P and OLED65E6P. Not only does this allow for more detail to be resolved in highlights in comparison to HDR10 content, but also scenes without highlights can be reproduced faithfully, without any darkening of the mid-tones.

The OLED65E6P's integrated 2.2 channel sound bar has been designed in collaboration with harman/kardon. It has a total audio power of 40 Watts, the half of which (20 Watts) is being allocated to the woofer. While the OLED65B6P and OLED65C6P don't have a built-in sound bar, their 4.0 channel speaker system is also a product of LG's collaboration with harman/kardon so they, just like the OLED65E6P, feature the OLED Surround mode for more immersive soundscape. The total sound output power on the OLED65B6P and OLED65C6P is 40 Watts but they don't have a woofer meaning the bass is not as deep as on the OLED65E6P.

The OLED65E6P and OLED65B6P have 4 HDMI inputs while the OLED65C6P has only 3 HDMI inputs. HDCP 2.2 is supported on all HDMI ports. The OLED65E6P, OLED65B6P and OLED65C6P all have 10-bit panels and processing but in order for them to be able to display 10-bit YCbCr 4:2:0 signal (or 8-bit 4:4:4) at 4K @ 60Hz, you'll need to set the ULTRA HD Deep Color to ON for the specific HDMI input you're using for connecting the external device (e.g. 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player). Each model of the three series has 3 USB ports. It has to be said, though, that only one of the three USB ports is version 3.0 while the rest are 2.0.

The OLED65E6P and OLED65C6P support the passive 3D format and include 2 pairs of polarized 3D glasses. The OLED65B6P, on the other hand, lacks any 3D capabilities so you won't be able to watch 3D content on it. The OLED65E6P includes the Premium Magic Remote control, which is bigger than the OLED65B6P and OLED65C6P's basic Magic Remote. That being said, both the premium and basic versions have the same point and click functionality that allows you to easily navigate the webOS 3.0 smart platform that all three OLED TVs mentioned in this comparison review are equipped with.

Thanks for that article !I don't understand why the deep color color has to be set or not for each HDMI inputs... is it not an auto-detect feature when activated ?What does it mean if, by example, i set the hdmi input of my LG55c6v to deep color with a connected source (an onkyo TX-NR609) swaping it's output between 24 and 36bit depending of its own sources (some are deep color(B-R), some not..) ?ThanksEddy

Unfortunately, there isn't an Auto setting for the HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color. Selecting ON equals enabling support for Deep Color, rather than enabling auto-detection. You'll have to manually set it to either On or Off, depending on whether the source device supports Deep Color or not. If you set the HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color to On while your TX-NR609 is set to output 24-bit, it's possible to have some picture atrtifacts, but as I don't have the same AV receiver as you, I can't really tell how exactly it would behave. If feasible with your setup, you could perhaps try connecting the devices that support Deep Color directly to the C6 in order to avoid constantly switching the HDMI Ultra HD Deep Color On and Off. I hope that helps.

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